


Cold Air, Warm Metal

by unintelligiblescreaming



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Angst, Artificial Intelligence, Canon Compliant, Gen, Gun Violence, Minor Character Death, Pre-Canon, maxwell didn't start off in the si-5 when she came to goddard, maxwell is a terrible human being and i love her, maxwell is much more ok with killing humans than ais, moral compass what moral compass?, rhea and rachel get short cameos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-03-07
Packaged: 2019-03-28 04:06:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13895886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unintelligiblescreaming/pseuds/unintelligiblescreaming
Summary: Dr. Alana Maxwell, age 23, is a computational genius with a visionary dream for the future of artificial intelligences, a good aim with a shotgun, and not nearly enough sleep. She was hired by Goddard Futuristics five months ago, and she is currently entertaining a vivid fantasy where she picks up the espresso machine on the counter next to her and smashes it repeatedly into her coworker’s skull.





	Cold Air, Warm Metal

Dr. Alana Maxwell, age 23, is a computational genius with a visionary dream for the future of artificial intelligences, a good aim with a shotgun, and not nearly enough sleep. She was hired by Goddard Futuristics five months ago, and she is currently entertaining a vivid fantasy where she picks up the espresso machine on the counter next to her and smashes it repeatedly into her coworker’s skull.  
  
The coworker in question is a man named Geoffrey Newton. He has a weak chin, an awful little mustache and eyebrows that merge into a single, deeply annoying unibrow whenever she says anything (a) more intelligent than he expected, (b) radical in regards to the treatment of AIs, or (c) at all. At the moment she’s attempting to explain why placing an unnecessary collar program on the SENSUS unit they’re working on would be a stupid idea.  
  
“You can’t solve every behavioral problem with obedience programming,” she says.  
  
“What else do you think I should do? Send it to therapy?” He snorts.  
  
“You know, that might not be a terrible idea! _She_ is refusing to cooperate because you talk to her like she’s a thing instead of a person. Would _you_ work for someone who treated you like an inanimate object?”  
  
“Alana,” he says slowly. “It’s a mess of wires inside a big box. Just because—”  
  
“Maxwell.” She hates people saying her given name in that condescending voice, like they’re speaking to a child; it reminds her too much of things that were said to her when she was a child.  
  
“What?”  
  
“It’s Maxwell. Not Alana.” She would add something cutting like “Alana is for my friends,” but she hasn’t had a friend that she didn’t make since she was eleven years old.  
  
“Fine… Maxwell.  Just because it can form coherent sentences and interact socially doesn’t mean there’s actually a person inside there.” He taps his fingers on the desk. “It’s an illusion. It’s not a person, not really.”  
  
There’s so much she could say to that, from what she should say ( _We have created a sentient entity and we should treat her as such_ ) to what she wants to say ( _Hahaha, I’d make a joke about how just because you can form coherent sentences doesn’t mean you’re a person, but since you struggle with that on a good day…_ ) to what she wishes she had never needed to say ( _I am a person, I am a person, I am a person, no matter how hard you deny it, no matter what you see when you look at me and the things I do and the things I love_ ). But she’s saved from choosing any one of them by the polite knocking at the glass sliding door of their section of the Goddard R&D office.  
  
It’s the receptionist. “Is Dr. Maxwell here? There’s someone to see you.”  
  
“Who is it?” She has no appointments scheduled today.  
  
“He says his name is Warren Kepler.”  
  
  
  
  
  
This is the first time she’s seen Kepler since the day she took Goddard’s job offer. It’s been as if he vanished from the face of the Earth. (It will be years before she learns that she wasn’t too far off. He’d recently returned from his first visit to the _U.S.S. Hephaestus_ , cleaning up the mess Dmitri Volodin made of the station’s first crew.)  
  
They sit in her new office, with its bland carpet and wilted potted plant and the approximately fifty billion sticky notes covering most of the desk and the monitor. As they make stilted small talk, she’s reminded that she doesn’t actually know what Kepler does. She’d thought he worked for HR, but he’s not on any of the salary listings for that department. She’s checked.  
  
“How are you settling in to the AI Research and Development division? I trust you and Dr. Newton are getting along well.”  
  
She opens her mouth to say something like “of course,” because this is a specific kind of human interaction that she’s carefully learned the script to, but Kepler has an unnervingly perceptive gaze and she has the creeping suspicion that he can see through every lie she’s ever told just by looking at her. Somewhere between her brain and her tongue, the “of course” turns into “He’s an idiot and I want to never, ever speak to him again.”  
  
Kepler quirks an eyebrow. “Oh?”  
  
“I have no idea why Goddard hired him,” says Maxwell, because it’s too late to turn back now. Even if she’s badmouthing the corporation that gave her the best intellectual opportunity of her life in front of the man who recruited her. “If he were to suffer a tragic accident tomorrow I’m confident it would probably increase R&D’s productivity by at least 17.5%.”  
  
“That’s a very specific number, Dr. Maxwell.”  
  
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while.”  
  
He’s been smiling the whole time. She glances at the minuscule crinkles of his eyes and wonders if it’s amusement or something else; she has no way to tell. Then she directs her gaze somewhere else, because she’s not a fan of eye contact in general and there’s something about Kepler specifically that raises the hairs on the back of her neck, makes her instincts scream _danger danger danger_ for no specific reason that she can consciously identify.  
  
He asks, “While I’m here, are there any questions you’d like to ask me?”  
  
She intends to say “not really,” but once again, somewhere between her brain and her mouth it ends up being “Actually, yes. Can you explain why there’s a gun taped underneath my desk?”  
  
A look of mild surprise. “Wasn’t that part of your tour of the facilities? It’s only a cautionary measure in the event of a hostile takeover of the premises. You’re working on some extremely sensitive intellectual property here. It’s extremely unlikely that anything like that would ever happen while you work here, of course, but… better safe than sorry. Wouldn’t you agree, Dr. Maxwell?”  
  
His body language is relaxed, guileless. But Maxwell grew up with every conversation a minefield, learning to analyze every word, every gesture for hidden intent. She knows what a predator looks like when she sees one.  
  
“Yes,” she says. “Better safe than sorry.”  
  
“You know how to use a firearm, don’t you?” He asks the question like he already knows the answer.  
  
Maxwell learned to shoot in her parents’ backyard, her older brother teaching her to shoot empty cans balanced atop fence posts, like a movie cliché. She can recall it so clearly: the unforgiving grey sky, the icy morning air, the warm metal in her hands. When the world was too loud to bear, there was always the sudden quiet after the gunshot. Her fingers shook in the classroom, at the dinner table under her father’s eyes, but out in the open with her eye on the target, her aim never wavered.  
  
She’s only ever fired a gun at a human being once before. It was two years ago, in the living room of her apartment. Her father had been calling her at home and at work with increasing insistence, furious as always at being ignored. One day she’d opened her door to find him standing outside. She’d stepped back out of shock. A mistake; he took it as an invitation to come in. When she summoned her voice and told him to leave, he ignored her. And she took the gun from the kitchen cupboard and shot him in the leg.  
  
Her fingers did not shake. Her aim did not waver. And the rush of—power? satisfaction? relief?—that crashed through her—like a power surge, like a system reboot—it was—  
  
Well. She doesn’t know how to phrase it exactly. But she’s pretty sure she’s supposed to find it frightening, horrifying, not—steadying. She’s not supposed to feel it quiet her pulse and leave her mind in a calm, still place where her thoughts flow as clear as air.  
  
“Yeah,” she says. “I know how to use a gun.”  
  
  
  
  
  
It’s just another day when the attack comes. First the power flickers out, taking the electronic locks with them. They’re trapped inside. Next is shouting, heavy footfalls, a single ringing gunshot. Everyone in the office looks confused, almost painfully so, but there’s a voice in the back of her head that says _Here it is, here’s the punchline, here’s the recoil, here’s what you’ve been waiting for._

 _Watch closely now._  
  
Everything spins out of control. There are four men, faces covered, and one of them shoots Newton when he goes for the button to call security. It was a stupid move, she thinks in a strange, detached way as she watches the blood leaking out of the dark hole in her erstwhile coworker’s skull. If they’re here, then it means the security guys are already taken out.  
  
And now the man who’s acting like he’s in charge is demanding someone use their auth codes to override the security protocols on the Goddard computers. Already someone is moving, shaking and terrified, to comply. Maxwell stays still, shoulders hunched in, relying on her small stature and unassuming manner to make her less of an obvious target. She’s thinking about how swiftly the first man killed Newton, no hesitation, no warning cry. These people are professionals, and there’s no reason to expect them to leave Maxwell alive.  
  
She lets her hand creep closer to the underside of the desk.  
  
One of her coworkers is stuttering helplessly as they try to explain to the person holding a weapon to their head why their auth code isn’t working. Then one of the men mutters something to the other, holding up a burner phone, and the one who seems to be the leader curses. He barks a few orders and all of them rush out except for the leader.  
  
The leader’s attention is focused on that side of the room.  
  
So Maxwell takes the gun. She aims. She fires.  
  
Before the echo has faded, she’s in motion, taking furniture from around the lab and pushing it up against the door. “Get up and help me,” she shouts at her shell-shocked colleagues.  
  
However, it becomes quickly apparent that she’s the only person in the room who can react sensibly in a crisis, so it’s up to her to grab the giant spare charger in the closet, link it to the main computer, and wake up the SENSUS unit they’re training for an extraterrestrial assignment, Rhea, so that the AI can retake control of the building’s security systems. It requires some very fast rewriting of Rhea’s compliance protocols, since AIs taking over the buildings where their creators work is the stuff of robot apocalypse novels and generally frowned upon by Goddard. It’s the kind of thing that Maxwell is really not supposed to do, but she trusts Rhea, and honestly they have bigger things to worry about.  
  
  
  
  
  
There should have been a moment, somewhere in there, where Maxwell panicked or threw up in a trash can or burst into tears. She keeps expecting it to happen for a long while afterward, waiting for the moment where it all hits her and she breaks down.  
  
But it doesn’t. She watched someone die and killed someone else, and she’s fine with it.  
  
She’s always known—she’s always been told—that she wasn’t very good at being a human being. It stopped bothering her around the same time she realized how much easier it was to speak to machines than people. It’s a bit of a surprise, though, to see how far it extends.  
  
A few days later, she walks into work and realizes that something’s up. There’s a nervous energy about her (remaining) colleagues. Several of them are just hovering in the hallway, casting anxious looks at the door to their office.  
  
When she goes to open the door, she’s stopped by a hand on her arm. She twitches away from the touch, scowling at the person invading her personal space. It’s her supervisor, Trina Euclid. “What is it?” she snaps.  
  
“They’re not letting us in,” Trina explains. “Goddard higher-ups. It’s related to… what happened.”  
  
No one at the office wants to talk directly about Newton getting shot. Maxwell finds it irritating and vaguely childish. Yes, they’re grieving, but what do they think dancing around the issue is going to do?  
  
Trina sees something over Maxwell’s shoulder. Her eyes widen slightly in alarm. She pulls Maxwell into an alcove in the hallway, out of the way of the main passage, as a man in a rumpled jacket and messy hair saunters past, swinging a duffel bag at his side. Trina notices Maxwell’s confusion and says in a low voice, “Do you know who that is?”  
  
“Should I?”  
  
“It’s a good sign for your continued health and safety that you don’t,” she says grimly. “His name’s Daniel Jacobi. He makes Goddard’s problems go away. Permanently. Usually with large quantities of explosives.”  
  
“O…kay. And is that why we’re hiding?”  
  
“Trust me, you don’t want him to notice you. People who get mixed up with him, well, they usually don’t come back in one piece. And his boss… you don't want to know.”  
  
“I… kind of do?”  
  
Trina looks at her sympathetically. “Look, it was a really brave thing you did, the other day. You saved our lives, and I’m ever so grateful. That’s why I’m giving you this warning. Every now and then someone comes to R &D, and then a few months in _something happens_ , something out of the ordinary, something different each time. And then someone like _that man’s superior_ comes to talk to them, and then no one hears from them again. Just… be careful. I don’t know why he’s here, but—”  
  
A voice behind them: “They haven’t told you?”  
  
Maxwell spins around. It’s a woman with bright red curls, an impeccably tailored suit, and a smile sharp enough to cut. Maxwell doesn’t understand how she managed to sneak up without her noticing, not when Maxwell’s situational awareness is usually on a hair-trigger.  
  
The stranger rolls her eyes and explains, “It’s off limits because the Strategic Intelligence division is taking a few minutes to run their grubby mitts over everything in case it’ll tell them if anyone here was conspiring with whichever corporation tried to steal our tech. Kepler and the rest of those buffoons couldn’t spot a clue if there was a giant arrow pointing to it, of course, but I’m sure it makes them feel better.”  
  
“Ah,” says Maxwell. She’s never seen this person before in her life. “So, you know Kepler, then?”  
  
“Unfortunately I do,” says the woman, lip curling. “Some advice for you, Dr. Maxwell. If he asks you if he’s ever told you about so-and-so time he did so-and-so implausible thing in so-and-so obscure region, leave while you can.”  
  
“You, er, have the advantage of me,” says Maxwell, because she doesn’t know why this woman knows her name and she doesn’t know what else to say to that.  
  
“Yes, I certainly do,” she says cheerfully. “My name is—”  
  
The door opens, cutting her off. Kepler walks out, then stops in his tracks. His gaze flicks to Maxwell, passing over Trina entirely, and then moves to the stranger. His eyes narrow in dislike. “Miss Young,” he drawls. “Fancy meeting you here.”  
  
“Likewise, Warren… I was passing by and happened to wonder if this was a good time to meet the new talent you’ve been telling Mr. Cutter about.” Young rakes Maxwell up and down with a glance. “She’s… not much, but I suppose she’s be okay at finding new and creative ways to break things.”  
  
“As always, your input is carefully noted, conscientiously considered, and summarily discarded with deep disdain,” says Kepler. “Now, I’d like to convey to you some information that may be vital for you to know.”  
  
“And what is that?”  
  
“That over there, Miss Young, is the exit. Please use it.” He turns to Maxwell. “Now I’m a bit busy at the moment, doctor, but I’d like to speak with you tomorrow. Three o’clock sharp, don’t be late.” He takes a business card from a pocket and presses it into Maxwell’s hand, nods politely at them both, and leaves.  
  
At 2:55 p.m. the next day, Maxwell is in the reception area of an office that according to Google Maps is the Goddard Futuristics Center for Competitive Business Initiatives, mindlessly flipping through battered magazines and listening to bland, inane music on the overhead speakers that feels like it’s boring a hole through her skull. She fights the creeping suspicion that this is actually Goddard’s corporate espionage headquarters and that she may have, metaphorically speaking, jumped into the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim.  
  
A few minutes after three o’clock, the receptionist leads her out of the lobby, down a hallway lit by harsh fluorescent glare, and into an office. It’s immediately clear that Major Warren Kepler (which is the name on the brass nameplate on the desk) does not spend much time here, because the only objects that even vaguely hint at a personality are a nondescript potted plant and a sleek desktop computer, neither of which say much. Maxwell fidgets in the uncomfortable wooden chair on the opposite side of the desk and stares at the plain grey carpeting.  
  
Kepler enters at 3:15 p.m. on the dot and greets her warmly—the kind of warmth that has to be practiced in a mirror—makes small talk, and then says, abruptly serious, “Dr. Maxwell, I need to be frank with you. You’re not a good fit for R &D.”  
  
“Really,” she says slowly. That’s not the direction she expected this conversation to go.  
  
“You’ve proven yourself incapable of respecting Goddard’s research objectives, observing security protocol regarding in-development artificial intelligences, or interacting civilly with your coworkers. Half of the department filed complaints about you in the first two weeks after you were hired—a company record. No, I’m afraid it won’t be possible for you to continue working there.”  
  
“You brought me here so that you could tell me I was fired?”  
  
“Yes.” He pauses. “So I have to ask you something.”  
  
She raises an eyebrow (a skill she perfected at age fourteen) and waits for the punchline. She can feel that this is some kind of test, that there's something Kepler's refusing to say just yet.  
  
“When you put a bullet in that man’s head,” he says, “how did it feel?”  
  
She thinks about it. She considers the ease with which she pulled the trigger; she considers the emotional recoil that never came.  
  
“Honestly?” she says. “It was just another Wednesday.”  
  
He smiles.  


 

 

Forty-eight hours later, she’s working for the SI-5.

 

 

 

It takes her a year and a half to ask Kepler for the full story.  
  
There’s blood speckled on her chin—not hers, but from when she was too slow to move out of the way when a soldier’s sliced jugular sprayed out in a wide arc. Disgusting, but she doesn’t care about that right now. She’s angry and frustrated. For one thing, she’s sporting a broken ankle, which annoys her because it reminds her of a damsel in distress from a terrible romance novel. For another, the gunshot graze in her side is bleeding at an alarming rate, and she’s feeling dizzy.  
  
As Kepler drives them away from the military complex they just finished infiltrating, she glares at the dashboard in the hope that if she concentrates on staring at a single point hard enough she’ll stop seeing double. She wishes Jacobi were here to distract her with a sarcastic comment or a silly argument, but he’s on solo assignment somewhere Kepler won’t give her details about.  
  
“A question for you,” says the Major.  
  
“Yes, sir?”  
  
“How do you feel about funk music?”  
  
“Cautiously neutral?” If this leads to a Long Story Short, she’s going to smash her forehead against the dashboard until she knocks herself out.  
  
“Hmm,” he says. He takes a CD out of the compartment between the driver’s seat and the passenger’s side and feeds it into the car stereo. It is, indeed, funk music. The next seven minutes are spent silently listening to music that she honestly can’t muster an opinion about. Maxwell can’t decide which is more surreal, the fact that she’s just stolen classified documents from a secret military base on the other side of the planet from her hometown or the fact that Kepler is bobbing his head slightly to the beat.  
  
The seat is sticky from her blood. She’s restless. She wants to reach under the seat and check to make sure the handgun she placed underneath is still there and in working condition, keep its comforting weight in her hands, but she doesn’t want to jostle her wound.  
  
And she doesn’t want to think about what she had to do.  
  
It’s not that she shot someone. She shot several someones, in fact, and the worst emotion she experiences regarding that is mild annoyance; they weren’t supposed to arouse suspicion, let alone get into a firefight. But the Major hasn’t reprimanded her yet, or adopted the terrifyingly cheery demeanor he gets when he’s truly furious but has decided that he’s going to act friendly for a few minutes in order to build up her dread before he tears into her. Probably because he didn’t foresee them being caught either.  
  
No, what her brain keeps circling back to is the AI housed within the base. That was housed within the base, before Maxwell deleted him.  
  
Deleting him hadn’t been the plan. The plan was to sneak in, get the files, remove the security footage, and sneak out. But the security system was different than they anticipated. They set foot in the control room and alarms began to blare, and the quickest way to fulfill the mission and escape was to delete the AI altogether.  
  
Delete. Such a crisp, impersonal word. She’s heard it from the mouths of her colleagues all her professional life. It’s a synonym for _kill_ , a synonym for _murder_.  
  
Maxwell is very much aware that, as a person, she is extremely fucked up. She is acutely conscious of how when they burst out of the control room and found soldiers racing toward them, she was firing a half-second before Kepler was, eager to lose herself in the steady rhythm. _Aim/release, aim/release, aim/release._ A breath drawn in, held, let out. She was eager to wash her thoughts clean like a breath of icy morning air.  
  
She shuts her eyes and lets her head thud back against the seat. She’s tired and angry and—something else too. She remembers how she came to work for SI-5 instead of R &D.  
  
“The day I was hired,” she says abruptly. “Did you plan it?”  
  
“Did I… plan it? Doctor, I sent you phone calls at your workplace every day for half a year.”  
  
“Not that. In the Goddard labs. With Newton. How much was planned? Was it all staged? Was any of it?”  
  
Kepler tilts his head. “If you’re asking if those guys in ski masks and black clothes were actually there to steal confidential data, then the answer is no. But it wasn’t all for your benefit either.”  
  
“Then what else was it for?”  
  
“Oh, a little bit of this, a little bit of that… part of it was planting a few clues at the crime scene so that when the police arrived, the investigation pointed in the direction of one of Goddard’s competitors. The resulting PR fit brought down their stock prices nicely, I hear, and it took some pressure off of us at Strategic Intelligence. And part of it was getting rid of a weak link in our R&D department.”  
  
“You mean me.”  
  
“I mean Geoffrey Newton,” says Kepler. He catches Maxwell’s shocked expression and laughs. “What was it you said? _If he were to suffer a tragic accident tomorrow—”_  
  
“I wasn’t _serious—”_  
  
“But Dr. Pryce was,” he says. “She expressed rather a similar sentiment shortly after that meeting of ours. When Dr. Pryce decides that a company asset is no longer useful, it behooves the rest of us to ensure it is… discarded. Besides, we needed something to raise the stakes, to see how you handled it.”  
  
“Huh,” she says. “So I guess the guys with the balaclavas were, what, SI-2? I killed one of them, so I hope they weren’t too important.”  
  
He snorts. “No need to worry about that.”  
  
Their conversation peters off. The CD finishes and Kepler doesn’t put in a new one, thank god, and they stay in companionable silence, or something approximating it. Maxwell is vaguely surprised that Kepler doesn’t fill it with chatter, but she’s too exhausted physically and emotionally to wonder why. Her mind wanders to the moments when she erased the AI’s personality core, how she glanced through the functions that told the AI how to think and speak and feel, and how it was so tangible in a way that a human body going still was not, because when a human died she couldn’t see their thoughts being strangled one by one. She couldn’t feel it.  
  
Outside, the sky turns from cold blue to dark cobalt. The sun sets. She slips into sleep, and tastes iron and gunpowder in her dreams.

**Author's Note:**

> this was written all at once late at night so let me know if there are any typos etc. pls...
> 
> also it feels very strange to write a si-5 fic without jacobi directly involved but that's just how it goes sometimes i guess


End file.
